Skid row street population surges back in Los Angeles

A city initiative had helped to reduce the numbers and clean up the sidewalks, but the weak economy and other factors have reversed the trend.

As evening falls, a dazed woman with a gangrenous thumb spreads a blanket over a row of plastic crates to make a bed on the urine-soaked sidewalk.

As many as 10 people are camping along this stretch of pavement on 6th Street in downtown Los Angeles. Their belongings — tents, sleeping bags, shopping carts, a leather chair, at least two microwaves and piles of clothing — nearly cover the concrete. Rats scuttle in the gutter. A bony man lights up a crack pipe.

Scenes like these had all but disappeared several years ago when the Safer City Initiative brought 50 additional police officers to the 50 gritty blocks known as skid row. Crime rates dropped, homeless encampments were cleared and the street population shrank.

Now the pendulum is swinging back.

"We nearly had demolished the skid row of old," said the Rev. Andrew Bales, who heads the Union Rescue Mission on San Pedro Street. "It's right back to what it was."

The latest setback in the city's efforts to clean up skid row is a reminder of how intractable the homeless problem remains, even as gentrification has brought luxury lofts and trendy restaurants to downtown neighborhoods. Although there is debate about the reasons, most agree that the prolonged economic slump is a major factor.

Los Angeles police officers perform monthly counts of the people they see sleeping on the sidewalks. According to their figures, the skid row street population fell from 1,876 in September 2006 to 721 the following March — driven to other communities, according to activists.

For the most part, the count remained below 800. But as the economy continued to sputter, advocates for the homeless say, more people exhausted their resources, and funding was cut for many of the programs that help keep people off the streets. By December, the number of people on neighborhood streets had swelled to 1,693, even as homeless figures fell across the county as a whole.

"It's because there is such need, and it's because there is such a concentration of services there," said Jeff Dietrich of the Los Angeles Catholic Worker, which runs a soup kitchen on 6th Street.

The Safer City strike force remains in place but has repeatedly faced charges that its tactics amount to the criminalization of homelessness. One of the tools the city used was to remove unattended items to keep the sidewalks clear.

But a federal court ruling last year blocked that.

LAPD Lt. Shannon Paulson, who is in charge of the Safer City Initiative, said that as the streets became more cluttered, they became harder to police. At the same time, she said, jail budget cuts were forcing the early release of drug dealers, pimps and thieves who prey on the neighborhood's vulnerable residents.

read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-skid-row-homeless-20120328,0,3088327.story